In 2008, candidate Barack Obama promised to “transform America.” At the time, I wrote that off as campaign hyperbole of no more substance than spiffy slogans such as “hope and change.”

I remember a few pundits trying to draw my attention to that promise to transform America as a dangerous pledge. A true “transformation” requires, first, a destruction of the form in which something currently exists and, second, a re-assembly of the pieces into an entirely different form.

Lines of demarcation have always existed, defining different genders, races, classes, ages, ethnicities, incomes and sexual preferences — always. From time to time in this country’s history, strains among different groups defined by those lines have occupied politicians who alternately sought to exploit them for power or heal them for the sake of national survival.

A shared concept of what it meant to be an American once served as the cohesive agent that always overcame pressures for dissolution.

Americans share that concept no longer.

Enter Obama and his lawless regime. He and the media have turned those simple lines of social demarcation into active fault lines, separating Americans into squabbling, implacably hostile, perpetually aggrieved, self-interest groups.

From Ferguson to the Supreme Court, Obama has reduced America to bands of ideological combatants. Whatever academically abstract plan he has for re-assembly will elude him. Obama and his regime have not only separated America into parts, he’s ruining the parts.

Why did “transformation of America” have to be the one promise Obama bothered to keep?

Leonard Hoy, Greenwood